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^ well, just google "country music or rockabilly and the blues". You should get a wealth of info, some of it very surprising. One little tidbit. In the 1920s and 1930 there were white people who painted their faces and travelled around playing blues and country music. I am not saying though that the blues was not invented by blacks.
Edited by timothy leary - January 08 2013 at 15:34
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 15:21
timothy leary wrote:
You forgot to mention country music which really grew up side by side with blues music and even sometimes overlapped.
Please excuse an ignorant Brit, but I always thought that country music was roots played by white settlers, whilst blues was created by descendants of black slaves, before being usurped by rebellious white teens in the fifties. In other words, from completely different traditions.
As to the original question, prog was born in England in the late sixties by a bunch of artie middle class college students. At the time, black members of that class would have been rare than sightings of Christ in the past 2000 years. Also, they would not have been too well disposed towards symphonic music or jazzy noodlings, and I should stress here that I am not a racist (I am a member of Amnesty and a former trade union activist).
Actually, without meaning this as a personal insult, it is rather a silly question.
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 15:12
timothy leary wrote:
You forgot to mention country music which really grew up side by side with blues music and even sometimes overlapped.
Bingo ... yet another country in America!
As I've stated before, America is like 4 or 5 countries ... heck, in the space that you have America, how many countries do you have in Europe? It's really hard to discuss music in America when the differences are so varied ... and many times not appreciated in their own country's other areas!
Edited by moshkito - January 08 2013 at 15:15
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 14:56
jude111 wrote:
Hercules wrote:
Black? White? Any other colour in between?
What does it matter?
My ancestors went for a walk about 70000 years ago and turned left when they left Africa. My friend Vijay's ancestors turned right instead. Some people's ancestors didn't feel the need to go for a walk because they liked it in Africa.
I really don't see the need to get hung up on race when we all came from the same ancestors and we're all really the same except for varying amounts of skin pigment. Maybe where we ended up affected us more from a cultural standpoint; perhaps African Americans got exposed to Country music which is possibly why they invented the blues to express their dissatisfaction and I totally understand!
I'd ask a different question - why are so few women involved in prog except as singers???
We're not the same. Our histories and our cultures have been very, very different. Whites did not invent blues - they could not have invented it. Robert Johnson was black; no white person could have sounded or played like him. (The best a white person could do is imitate it, years later.) Ella Fitzgerald's voice, Sarah Vaughan's voice, carries within it their experience and culture as African-Americans living in a racist environment, emerging from slavery and fighting against an Apartheid-like segregation. The style and playing of Satchmo and Coltrane, and polyrhythmic swing of bebop, wow, man, whites didn't invent that. So, no, not the same.
Even today, whites have made great contributions to hip-hop - but they didn't invent it, rap didn't emerge out of white culture, it came directly out of black culture.
I understand what you are saying, but in some places, such as the USA, saying that "we're all the same" can often sound like a white-wash - minimizing black contribution to culture and art, and at the same time making it seem that whites could have invented it.
You're in England, right? If we are going to talk about English cuisine, and we start talking about curry, and someone points out the valuable contribution that Indians and Pakistanis have made to British cuisine, would you start saying, "Hey, man, leave them out. White, black, we're all the same"? No, of course not, that would be absurd.
I was referring to our genetic make up being almost identical. We are genetically almost identical irrespective of our race since we are all descended from the same common group of ancestors, except for a few Neanderthal genes that got into everyone's make up except Sub-Saharan Africans.
Culturally, of course there are differences. The abomination that was the slave trade (one of my proudest claims is that I went to the same school as William Wilberforce, who abolished the trade in Britain) undoubtedly left indelible marks on those who survived, but it's the differing cultural influences that make our music different, not our genetics. All racial groups have contributed to the culture of the US; to denigrate what any of them have achieved is exactly what racists do. I suspect prog evolved before the civil rights movement in the States had achieved any real degree of progress in freeing black people from the almost endemic discrimination and segregation they had suffered, meaning that they were mainly exposed to the music of their communities, which was jazz, blues, soul and rock.
And as far as Asian cuisine is concerned, it's so engrained in British culture that noone really thinks of it as "foreign" any more.
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 14:19
Sumdeus wrote:
i've never understood why people ever get concerned with race when it comes to music.
Because American history is a massive, filthy, ugly and vitriolic story of racism, complete with bullets and other very sad moments. You can say that the English had their woman hater and killer, but that was easier to deal with, when you were not killing all the scots and irish or anyone else. In America, these things were hidden for years, and even the end of the slave days by Lincoln, did not stop and Alabama and Georgia and other areas in America still have issues with it. The segregation thing in the 50's and 60's was an attempt to put these people back together again ... and sadly .. with schools like Notre Dame now putting together their own Catholic Belt ... and pretty soon, we have the Black Belt again, and then the Blah Blah belt ... and the separation continues ... instead of the integration.
The very fabric of American life has been "separation" ... and I'm not sure that American wants to deal with this ... until one day in the future, America becomes two or three other countries, because it can not support the integration and this means that the arts and the music ... will .. .again ... undergo a change, but maybe the black music and other arts will be way more visible beyond one style a pop something or other.
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 14:05
Ambient Hurricanes wrote:
Prog was so far removed from black culture in the 70's that I wouldn't have expected to see many black prog bands. Rock was based on blues music, a predominantly black genre (originally) but once you got down the line to progressive rock you had something that wasn't anything like the rootsy, groovy, soulful music prominent among black Americans at the time. It was just a completely different aesthetic than that of black culture.
...
NOT according to Tom Dowd ... you need to see that DVD! It will change your perception of the history of music in America and how much was killed and never heard!
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 14:03
jude111 wrote:
Why is Anglo-American prog so white? Other than jazz fusion, prog tended/tends to be lily-white. I think this is a shame, since I really love the sounds of funk and soul, and can only imagine how great black prog could've been. And maybe we should think about adding some black bands to PA? I mean, P-Funk could be pretty proggy and/or spacey at times (e.g. MAGGOT BRAIN).
Ohhh boy ... don't get me started ... because the answer would be ... all them imperialists ... you know they killed all the colors and stole history to make sure they lasted longer. Not sure they did that in prog, or progressive, but I will grant that they had the better MEDIA (in print) to help define it and bring it alive.
In America, the majority of music was killed, and was just like the movie studios killing black music in the 50's and 60's because their stars were more important ... like Elvis! Same thing in the 60's when the media made sure it told everyone that we were dirty, filthy, and left garbage behind and we were not intelligent enough to appreciate meaningful music, in one of the most insane documents of our time! On top of it, the player was black!
Need to know any more why I marched wiht Martin Luther King in Madison? And why the prog thing in London bugs me to no end?
Funny addon to this ... Steve Hillage interview when he said that they wanted to come to America and play all that funk and far out stuff, and that folks coming to their concerts were getting disappointed because they were not playing "progressive" music! Yeah!
Edited by moshkito - January 08 2013 at 14:32
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 12:01
Hercules wrote:
Black? White? Any other colour in between?
What does it matter?
My ancestors went for a walk about 70000 years ago and turned left when they left Africa. My friend Vijay's ancestors turned right instead. Some people's ancestors didn't feel the need to go for a walk because they liked it in Africa.
I really don't see the need to get hung up on race when we all came from the same ancestors and we're all really the same except for varying amounts of skin pigment. Maybe where we ended up affected us more from a cultural standpoint; perhaps African Americans got exposed to Country music which is possibly why they invented the blues to express their dissatisfaction and I totally understand!
I'd ask a different question - why are so few women involved in prog except as singers???
We're not the same. Our histories and our cultures have been very, very different. Whites did not invent blues - they could not have invented it. Robert Johnson was black; no white person could have sounded or played like him. (The best a white person could do is imitate it, years later.) Ella Fitzgerald's voice, Sarah Vaughan's voice, carries within it their experience and culture as African-Americans living in a racist environment, emerging from slavery and fighting against an Apartheid-like segregation. The style and playing of Satchmo and Coltrane, and polyrhythmic swing of bebop, wow, man, whites didn't invent that. So, no, not the same.
Even today, whites have made great contributions to hip-hop - but they didn't invent it, rap didn't emerge out of white culture, it came directly out of black culture.
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 07:01
Black? White? Any other colour in between?
What does it matter?
My ancestors went for a walk about 70000 years ago and turned left when they left Africa. My friend Vijay's ancestors turned right instead. Some people's ancestors didn't feel the need to go for a walk because they liked it in Africa.
I really don't see the need to get hung up on race when we all came from the same ancestors and we're all really the same except for varying amounts of skin pigment. Maybe where we ended up affected us more from a cultural standpoint; perhaps African Americans got exposed to Country music which is possibly why they invented the blues to express their dissatisfaction and I totally understand!
I'd ask a different question - why are so few women involved in prog except as singers???
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 02:17
Possibly to our detriment with some prog reviewers is our soulful, jazzy approach seen best here-check out about 2 minutes into this 3RDegree song from ProgArchives' #54 (today) prog album of 2012:
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 02:05
Sumdeus wrote:
Dellinger wrote:
I wonder if Jimi Hendrix had lived his natural life, if he might have become one of the prog icons?
I've heard he liked Hawkwind... and he wanted to move away from the traditional bass-drums-guitar set up towards the end of his life and into more experimental territory. I've read he even almost had a jam session with MIles Davis but Davis' management asked way too much money for it. So yeah if he didn't die I think the sky would be the limit as far as where his ambitions would take him. Hell, he was already pretty much experimenting with progressive elements a bit, 1983 A Mermaid I Shall Be is certainly early prog.
I never considered him prog, on the other hand he was experimenting for sure. Also he had a routine of taking his 3 minutes songs and turning them into 15 minutes and jam the crap out of 'em, but it was never prog. One aspect of him that is closer to prog is the fact that (most notable in his 69, 70 songs) he would write songs that he could strip bare the night after, and simply make a totally different version of them, and by that I mean he would improvise and actually replace his guitar role completely. Examples: Power Of Soul, Hear My Train a Comin', Machine Gun, Who Knows?, Stepping Stone, Message to Love.
His later period saw him returning to his roots and even replacing the Experience crew with 2 blacks, playing more earthy, bluesy songs, he was where he wanted to be. So no I don't think he would go towards progressive Rock as we know it.
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 01:54
Ambient Hurricanes wrote:
Prog was so far removed from black culture in the 70's that I wouldn't have expected to see many black prog bands. Rock was based on blues music, a predominantly black genre (originally) but once you got down the line to progressive rock you had something that wasn't anything like the rootsy, groovy, soulful music prominent among black Americans at the time. It was just a completely different aesthetic than that of black culture.
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 01:43
Stevie Wonder was quite progressive in the early seventies especially on Living For The City. He used the Yamaha GX1 very well ,an instrument also used by ELP and Led Zep.
Interesting comments about Hendrix who certainly was interested in prog and watched The Nice when they toured together in America (there were also other bands on the tour inc King Crimson I think).
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Posted: January 08 2013 at 01:00
jude111 wrote:
Why is Anglo-American prog so white? Other than jazz fusion, prog tended/tends to be lily-white. I think this is a shame, since I really love the sounds of funk and soul, and can only imagine how great black prog could've been. And maybe we should think about adding some black bands to PA? I mean, P-Funk could be pretty proggy and/or spacey at times (e.g. MAGGOT BRAIN).
Proof that black guys are not scarce in rock music and that they might even had an impact on future generations of musicians : Allman Brothers Band Buddy Miles Randy Jackson and two guys from the excellent short-lived band Dostance (AOR) Death (the proto-punk band) post-punk and ska-rock bands : Furyo, Simple Minds, The Cure (cf their live shows around 1984), The Selecter, The Specials, the Beat, producer Dennis Bovell (Pop Group, The Slits) In metal, Mike Smith from Suffocation (who popularized the blast beats), Rocky George with Suicidal Tendencies, Carley Coma of Candiria uses both rap and hardcore vocals in his metalcore project Candiria, Bodycount was an all-black metal project...
There are lot more.
"Magma was the very first gothic rock band" (Didier Lockwood)
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Why is Anglo-American prog so white?
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timothy leary wrote:
